> -- the use of apt-get for > software installation/upgrades is deprecated. aptitude has numerous > advantages, including more advanced dependency handling and a
OK, I wanted to know. HAD to know! Here's my googling results: ---- This page: http://www.andrewault.net/2010/05/03/aptitude-vs-apt-get-comparison-2/ Has a nice chart comparison. aptitude [un]hold seems to be the primary remaining hold out advantage of aptitude over apt-get. ---- http://pthree.org/2007/08/12/aptitude-vs-apt-get/ Says amongst other stuff: "Are we starting to see a pattern here? One command with different readable options (no unnecessary flags). And that’s just the tip of the ice berg. It gets better. For example, when searching for a package using aptitude, the results are sorted alphabetically (gee, imagine that) and justified in column width format. Heck, it will even tell you which one you have installed on your system already, instead of haphazardly listing the packages in some random, unreadable format, like apt-cache." ---- >From http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=3113775.0;wap2 Aptitude, if you use it exclusively for installing packages, will build and maintain a database of dependencies. Therefore, if you decide later to remove a package, aptitude will "remember" to also remove all dependencies that are not needed by some other package. http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/aptitude Note that you cannot achieve any benefit by alternating between apt-get and aptitude -- they both will work, but the aptitude database requires that you only use aptitude. ---- But from that psychocats.net address above: Apparently the new version of apt-get in Edgy Eft (Ubuntu 6.10) has a function that allows you to remove unused dependencies when removing an application: sudo apt-get autoremove applicationname So the points outlined on this page about using aptitude over apt-get are largely irrelevant if you're using Edgy Eft (6.10), Feisty Fawn (7.04), or any future version of Ubuntu. ---- -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
